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<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote/font><HR>Originally posted by Zone:
[B]What do you think which free web based site statistic is the fastest? Now I'm using Hitbox, but I don't know is it the best choice. Do you have any experience, comments or idea?
<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

I've tried many, but I think HitBox is definetely the best one available.

HitBox is the most comprehensive, but a lot of the stats go to waste. eXTReMe Tracker is a good one too, I believe the site is http://extreme-dm.com/ The icon is small too, and reports are very easy to read. SiteMeter is also great since it has a small button.

Almost all hosts keep logfiles on your pages. If your host offers a control pannel then you can view them their, and even sometimes manipulate them to display according to specifications.

Anyway, I would reccomend just using a CGI script. That way you won't have to display any annoying icons on your site. You can find these scripts at The Perl Archive (www.perlarchive.com) and HotScripts (www.hotscripts.com).

HitBox is supposed to be highly popular...I don't hear much about SiteMeter though...which is a shame...in my opinion, the smaller the counter is (SM's is quite tiny if you want it to be)...the better...not to mention the pie charts and graphs are very cool and highly useful...most people can get a better idea of how their site is doing from actually seeing it rather than starting at a bunch of numbers.

I installed Hitbox and like you said it's awfully buggy! Every stats page loads slowly and each second time I do a check they don't load properly...good thing they offer quite a few stats and don't force to show the numbers.

If it's buggy, then go with http://www.sitemeter.com - smaller button, the option to ignore 2 seperate IP Addresses from being tracked when visiting the site, and a privacy level so no one can view your stats...as well as pie charts and graphs...which are quite cool.

Because of SiteMeter, I was able to see that 99% of my visitors spoke English, and 1% spoke Japanese.

Ok. Now I have a lot of opinion, but I should like to know which is the fastest. SiteMeter or Hitbox or any other?
It is very important because if I would like to monitor the top path or the most requested pages, I have to insert a little code on every page. This code contains a link to the server which makes the monitoring. So when a user enter my site (or any of my pages), he have to wait until the monitoring server save the information about him. (information about the browser, browser version, operating system, domain name, etc.)
It takes a long time to track these infromations. So the speed is very important.
The question still who is the fastest?

Thanks TWTCommish, I am now with SiteMeter and it's much better than Hitbox in terms of speed and loading time...for both the stats page and my web pages because I use the transparent counter with privacy to the highest.

I don't know much about free trackers, however, if you want to go commercial -- WebTrends Professional is definitely the best. I have been using it for about a year. While it is on the expensive side, its worth it!

Unlike trackers, where you would go their site to recieve statistics, with WebTrends you will have to download the log files from your server and then let the software analyse it for you.

I just had to put all of the SiteMeter tracking code in comment tags due to the nice little greeting on the SiteMeter site:

"Welcome to Microsoft® Windows NT® 4.0 Option Pack"! This is quite nice...all my pages weren't properly loading due to their "issue"...I guess there isn't such a thing as a reliable stats software.

Btw, my host is using WebTrends Pro and it went down after 3 weeks and this was in January...they never fixed the issue and I have been without any stats for 6 months! My host said he would change stats software, which he never did.